Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Author Louise Erdrich was a teenager when she slept in a football field, by herself, looking up at the stars in the Great Plains skies. This event was tantamount to a rite of
passage into adulthood, from a “difficult” childhood. In an interview, she said, “My clearest
memory of growing up in North Dakota was the space and flatness. . . . I remember how things smelled and felt and
tasted when I went back to Turtle Mountains.”

In her books, those immense and limitless Plains skies
emerge almost as minor characters. In The Blue Jay’s Dance, she is homesick
for them, even as she lived in New Hampshire with her children and
then-husband, Michael Dorris. After
Dorris’ death, she moved back to Minnesota, her birthplace, to resume writing
books about those vast spaces.

Her non-fiction work--Books
and Islands in Ojibwe Country--tells of Erdrich’s trip with her baby and
life partner, Tobasonakwut, from Minnesota
to see rock paintings in Ontario, Canada. Like her previous works, Books and Islands interweaves the themes of Native American
culture, mythology, cosmology, art, and history. In addition, she writes in sacred terms of
Ojibwemowin, the complex language of the Ojibwe people—with thousands of
variations for a single verb.

The book depicts the full life that metamorphosed from a very painful
experience and time. In five
chapters—entitled “Books and Islands,” “Islands,” “Rock Paintings,” “Books,” “Home,”—Erdrich gives a glimpse of her life now: in her late
forties, she had a baby with her life partner.
In Chapter one, she talks unabashedly of her pregnancy: “I wept, I snarled, I laughed like a hyena. .
. . On the wall behind my midwife there
was a framed poster of that obnoxious poem about the woman who looks forward to
getting old so that she can wear purple.
I happened to be wearing purple that day, and I was old, and I was
pregnant.”

Yet, Erdrich is delighted with the baby herself, as the
little family sail in canoe over lakes, rocks, isles. “My happiness”—she writes—“in being an older
mother surprises me. . . .”

Then, she introduces readers to her new love, “Tobasonakwut,
the sun dancer”—who rock-climbs and “can sleep anywhere.” She says,
“He is a one-man spiritual ER.” A
teacher and spiritual healer, Tobasonakwut has created a foundation to further
Native American causes. As a child, he
was forbidden to speak the Ojibwe language.
If he did so, he was beaten or punished.
(By contrast, Erdrich learned Ojibwemowin as an adult—“I wanted to get
the jokes, [and] to understand the prayers . . . and the sacred stories. . .
.”)

Erdrich’s child was named after a mythical
spirit-woman—Nenaa’iikizhikok—who controls the stars and skies. A force of nature herself, Nenaa’iikizhikok
(or Kizhikok, “Sky Woman”) is one of “four spirit-women” in Native American
cosmology. These spirit-women “take care
of all of the waters of the world,” as Nenaa’iikizhikok “cleans up the sky
after a thunderstorm, makes sure the clouds are moving. The stars . . . in their places.”

Though we learn of Erdrich’s emotional renaissance, today a bookstore-owner,
traveler, new mom, with a new life partner, the ghost of her previous life
haunts us. Erdrich herself glosses over
this quickly. In chapter two, she states
that her two brothers helped her immensely after her husband’s death. They lived with her, to “guard my children. .
. and made sure I didn’t stay in bed all day. . . .”

As Erdrich and Dorris were well-known for their literary
collaboration, working on novels together in different capacities, many of us
wondered what her new books would be like?
Would the writing change? Would
we notice?

Fortunately, Books and
Islands continues Erdrich’s valiant effort to tell the complex story of the
Ojibwe people. She continues to be a
voice for her people. The book is a
mature prose volume, more grounded or earth-bound than, say, The Blue Jay’s Dance–a book I love, with
its lyrical, rounded, transluscent tones, a prose poem—a joy to read, filled
with delightful anecdotes of the writer’s life in New Hampshire, alongside
otters, birds, loons, and critters from the woods.

Moreover, we learn the importance of “tobacco offerings” in
daily life. The story of “trader’s
rum” chronicles the undoing of a man
through alcohol.

Erdrich also writes of
how reading books has sustained her.
Books such as Austerlitz,Middlemarch,Spirit Horses,Tristram Shandy,Concise Dictionary
of Minnesotan Ojibwe. She shares
with us a universal question she has asked herself and others since she was
aged nine: “What book would you take to a desert island?”

In Chapter four, Erdrich describes a blissful time gobbling
blueberries--“miinan” in Ojibwemowin--with Kiizhikok, her little daughter. She writes, “This is the one traditional
Ojibwe pursuit I’m good at. . . . We eat
with a lot of laughing.” Also, she
relates how one of her daughters—descended from a hunter-people—is a vegetarian. “The joke goes: What is an Ojibwe vegetarian
called? A poor hunter.”

“Home” is the book’s final chapter. “Home,” she writes, “is familiar and it is
disorienting.” It is a recurring theme
for Erdrich. Years ago, in an interview,
she said, “The women in my books are lighting out for home. . . .” And so, in Books
and Islands, as Erdrich approaches Minnesota and her life, “I start
dialing, and talk to my daughters from the road, check in with my household and
with my bookstore people, with my sisters and parents. All of a sudden I am back in the web of
connection. . . . [I ] muddle around
trying to enter the stream of my life.”

Books and Islands in
Ojibwe Country is a slender personal
travelogue that illuminates the history of the Ojibwe nation—while it
acknowledges Native American spirit-women and real women like Nancy Jones, a
female Ojibwe hunter. Also, “Striped
Earth Woman,” and “Acts Like a Boy”—the
author’s female ancestors. And the
ancient Nenaa’iikizhikok. Add to them
Louise Erdrich, the author of this
pensive book infused with the pulses of fierce women.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

For years, I’d heard of Louise Hay and her groundbreaking
book, You Can Heal Your Life. When I
first saw her in a TV interview, she
proclaimed how easy, effortless, magical her philosophy is.
According to Hay, your thoughts can be your
genie. Cristina Aguilera’s song comes to mind: “I can
make your wish come true/I’m a genie in a bottle. . . .”

The premise is that we create our lives through our thoughts.

In the book, Hay writes of changing one’s thoughts. Her philosophy is a kind of New Age
positive thinking.

Divided into four parts, the book details why it’s important
to change one’s thoughts, as well as how to do so. Part I introduces us to Hay’s
philosophy—which involves a re-programming of our conscious and subconscious
minds. In Part II, she delineates how we
can begin to change our thoughts (and thus our life circumstances). This section cites and describes mental
exercises—such as “Dissolving Resentment,” “Forgiveness,” “I am Willing to
Change,” “I Love Myself . . . .”

One important tool, she writes,
is the mirror: “I ask people to look in
their eyes and say something positive about themselves every time they pass a
mirror. The most powerful way to do
affirmations is to look in a mirror and say them outloud. . . . Now, look in a mirror and say to yourself, ‘I
am willing to change.’”

The gift edition of
the book is stunningly beautiful: each page is replete with vibrant watercolors
of flowers and seahorses and shells and stars and birds in magenta, royal blue,
fuschia, lime green, and sunflower yellow.

Amid this backdrop, Hay shares her revolutionary ideas: for
instance, in Chapter 10, the way to change someone else is to change
yourself. If you keep attracting jerks
into your life, look within and analyze why.
“Relationships are mirrors of ourselves.
What we attract always mirrors either qualities we have or beliefs we
have about relationships. This is true
whether it is a boss, a co-worker, an employee, a friend, a lover, a spouse, or
child. . . . You could not attract them
or have them in your life if the way they are didn’t somehow complement your
own life.”

Hay says recovery begins with self-love. The mirror exercise is a step toward
self-love. If you utter the words, “I
love myself” several times a day--while holding a mirror—your mind will begin
to believe this thought and behave accordingly.

Once you believe you’re worthy and lovable, you will begin
to make better choices. You will attract
someone who regards you as worthy and lovable.
Heartache avoided.

After reading the relationships chapter, I realized how
life-changing this philosophy is. More
often than not we want the other person to change. Then--when we focus on the other person’s
faults—situations escalate. “Why does
he always do that?” “I can’t believe she
said that!” “He’s always late!” “Why does he try to hurt me?” And it may end in domestic violence. Instead, says Hay, develop a little
compassion and try to envision the other person’s “inner child” and speak to
that child. Resentment
melts and the relationship is transformed.
Affirmations, prayer, and meditation help to further the process along.

In Hay’s own life, for example, she decided to move to
California. Her landlord—a problem for
other tenants—was a godsend to Hay. He
released her from the lease and bought her furniture. All the while, she had affirmed that her
relationship with the landlord was cordial and good.

Chapter 14 explicates how the body manifests our negative
thoughts, expressing the psychological, physical, and mental stresses in our
life as disease. “The stomach,” she
writes, “digests all the new ideas and experiences we have. What or who can’t you stomach? What gets you in your gut?” I f you can answer those questions, that
heartburn may begin to disappear.

The most astonishing chapter, for me, is the last chapter,
in which Louise Hay writes of her life and childhood.

She overcame many issues: a former teen runaway, Hay
experienced domestic violence as a teenager and as an adult. At a certain time in her life, she attracted
abusive men. But once she changed her
thoughts, her life changed. We must
learn to reject what’s not good for us.
Now she fears nothing (“All is
well”), and recently—in her mid-seventies--she took lessons in “ballroom
dancing.”

You Can Heal Your Life
is remarkably inspirational, a
phenomenal book that will evoke an intuitive wish for only good in your life.

About Me

Yolanda A. Reid is the author of The Honeyeater--a contemporary women's novel about love, heartbreak and betrayal that was a finalist for the 2014 Diva Awards. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in literary journals and e-zines such as “Women Writers: An E-zine”; Starlight Poets; Mysteries of the Lyric World; Many Voices, Many Lands and others. Her first novel--Porridge & Cucu: My Childhood--is about a young girl's adolescence. Her debut poetry collection, SONNETS TO THE JAPIM BIRD, is scheduled for release in June 2017. She lives in the USA.